What makes a short story collection? Thoughts on Natalie Serbers Shout Her Lovely Name

I consider myself very much a thematic reader. Im someone who draws parallels and connections and links wherever possible, and no matter how tenuous the relationships involved. And though its been far too long since Ive indulged my love of short fiction with a dip-in, dip-out collection, one of the reasons that Im drawn to short stories is the thematic threads that inevitably emerge from seeing so much of an authors work collected all together, all in once place.

I love seeking sameness and resonance amongst a bristly, disjointed affair, making order out of something that can be all about clamour and discord.

But Im not entirely sure that I like having that order imposed for me. And though an accomplished collection,'Natalie Serbers Shout Her Lovely Name'seems to do this, impressing upon the reader a particular reading order and forcing what seems like a handful of narrative intermissions throughout.

With the exception of the middle and final stories in the volume, the collection is one that concerns itself with the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship. It explores how womens identities and paths are created not only in response to those around them, but are also in a way created'by others, and given the setting of the book does this against a backdrop of emergent feminism. Feminism and the roles and identities of women are something thats grabbed at and wielded by its characters. But so often their efforts are, achingly and poignantly, misguided and unsuccessful: the collection highlights just how complex are the social elements of our lives.

The vast majority of the volume is concerned with mother-daughter duo Ruby and Nora and their uneasy, conflicted relationship. These stories occur in chronological order, gradually panning across Rubys life as she passes through her teen years and then into adulthood and then Noras as she does the same. What it means to be a mother and a daughterand indeed bothis the constant focus of the book, and we watch as the two stumble over and press against these enforced boundaries in their efforts to fulfil (or escape) these roles.

Nora didnt want to hear that her mother had done the same things. That she and her mother were similar in any wayshe wanted to make her own new and unique mistakes. She was nothing like Ruby.

The stories are beautifully written, particularly those from Noras perspective, which seem to have the greater depth to them. But theyre so tightly linked that its almost impossible not to read them as though theyre a novel unfolding along a generous chronological scale. The possibility of setting down the book only to pick it up at a later point, which I often find is one of the great joys of short story collections, is curtailed by this approach. So too is the ability for the reader to skip around through the stories and create a sort of personal mix-tape of whats on offer.

This is driven home all the more by those three stories that dont involve Ruby and Nora. Two of these occur as the first and final stories, and the third is inserted in the midst of the Ruby-Nora run, an awkward and angry intermission that feels so very strange and alien after being lulled into the sensation that youre actually reading a novel, not a series of shorts. Its like pulling off the freeway and stalling the car: youve been cruising along for so long that youve forgotten all about needing to change gears.

It was'This Is So Not Me, the intermission story in the middle of the book, that highlighted this the most for me. I understand its purpose: without it, the other two non-Ruby and Nora stories become mere bookends, their inclusion questionable. (The two are linked to each other by the naming of their female characters as lovely, but not as noticeably to the others.) But with this intermission story, these two stories dont become questionable inclusions. They become interruptions.

But why is this? Each of the stories, after all,'does stand alone. I could have read the Ruby-Nora stories in any order had I wished to.

I think its that my expectations about what makes a short story collection were interrupted and subverted. Without these three stories, I would have considered'Shout Her Lovely Name an episodic novel, or perhaps a novella, given the word length.

But with them (or perhaps with all the Ruby-Nora stories, to take a different perspective) things feel disjointed. The stories are all themed, of coursetheyre all to some extent about the relationships between mothers and their childrenbut the fact that the Ruby-Nora stories are so utterly, completely tied together puts them at odds with the three outcast stories. But what other order might have been acceptable? I feel as though we should have ended with a Ruby-Nora story, given the huge weight these characters carry throughout the collection, but then, where would that awkward third outcast story fit?

As a result, I found myself attempting not only to connect the three outcast stories with the others thematically, but also narratively. I sought to try to fit them into the chronological continuum of Ruby and Nora, or to seek out possible cameos and references. I felt as though my interpretive hand was being forced.

Clearly my expectation of a short story collection is that each of the stories within it fits in with a larger whole, but that they shouldnt be too closely linked. I think this applies in terms of all the basic elements of story: the narrative, the writing, the characters, the themes, and perhaps the setting as well. When everything is too closely linked, it takes on, to me, the feeling of a novel. When everything bar for a few exceptions is too closely linked, then those exceptions, even if they are thematically similar to the other stories, feel very much out of place. And a collection that isnt linked at all obviously doesnt quite feel right either.

Sadly, despite the engrossing characters and accomplished writing, the collection as a whole seemed to parallel the relationship between Ruby and Nora: at times rich and beautiful, but often'uneasy, conflicted and unsure of its place in the world.

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With thanks to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the review copy

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